


Stay

by Candylion22



Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Beth Lives, F/M, Gen, Memory Loss, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-14
Updated: 2017-11-14
Packaged: 2019-02-02 06:58:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,278
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12721830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Candylion22/pseuds/Candylion22
Summary: “I got shot in the head at the last place they told me I was safe.”She doesn’t say that part out loud, there’s no need to be brash. She’s a southern girl, she knows that, and manners still count for something.Besides, the half dollar of mutilated skin along her hairline where blonde locks never sprouted again probably speaks volumes for her. Just like the raised slashes along each cheek; too symmetrical to be accidental, lashes for non-compliance long before she fell off the wall and couldn’t put all the pieces back together again.





	Stay

**Author's Note:**

> Let me precede by saying I know this has been done before, a million times over. But what can I say, what kind of Bethyl shipper would I be if I never dipped my hand in the memory loss BethLives! pool at least once? This is a small, weird stand- alone that just came out and I felt like I had to post it. Just a little Beth Greene one shot. Clearly this isn’t completely on cannon as Deana is still alive post war and some other minor details. This is a Bethyl story but not overwhelmingly so, you can interpret their interaction at the end however you want.

She can’t stay.

She is a fish out of water.

Her 11th grade English teacher Mrs. Sherman would have circled the expression in red ink.

_Lazy and over used, Beth. You can do better._

There are entire years of her life that she cannot recall into more than sharp fragments that even when she pieces them together, spends hours matching jagged edges against one another, have gaps between them. The shards that fill those spaces are gone, unsalvageable dust.

She doesn’t know her mother’s name; can almost hold in her hands the way it sounded spilling from her daddy’s lips in a laugh but she can’t get the memory to manifest into a tangible word on her own tongue. She’s spent enough nights by firesides digging her fingernails into her palms to stop trying.

When she blinked into the harsh sunlight of the mass grave that was once Atlanta, the dead didn’t shock her. Just as her body could recall to walk, breath and shell in around itself when need be her muscles knew to aim for the brain. There was a familiarity to the slide of blade thru decomposed flesh and no hesitance to the mechanics of a Glock. She knew a man taught her to shoot a gun, tan and muscled and she can’t recall his name but knows he’s dead and she doesn’t know why but that feels ok, justified.

She knows there was life before and after, before and after the walkers that is. Morgan always chuckled when she called them that.

Beth remembered a world before the dead, could flip through images like the slides of a view master. Their table was always plentiful in food and love, she had doll babies and pink sheets and waded barefoot in a duck pond catching toads. She could close her eyes and recall the soft mane of a golden pony under her hands before they were the hard, scarred things always fidgeting on her knife handle. She remembered red Georgia dirt under leather boots with flowers stitched along the side and the safety of stained glass and a cross, repentance.

She had a Mamma, daddy, a brother and a sister.

But she couldn’t tell you their names, couldn’t shift them into the categories of alive or dead. Or undead.

Yet the strangest things, like the voice of a teacher in high school who took special interest in the fact that Beth spent more time jotting away in journals than doing her assignments, were prominent. She doesn’t know her mother’s name but she knows the voice scolding her inner thoughts belongs to Mrs. Sherman.

_Ok, Mrs. Sherman._

She is a trout, slapping around in silent panic on a splintery dock while her mouth fills with blood around the steel hook protruding through her lip.

_Better?_

And this miniscule woman in the arm chair fit for a grandmother’s den is the satisfied gamesman watching her flail with a proud grin. The only real question is whether Deana plans to release her catch after some poking and prodding or fry it up for dinner.

“You can make yourself comfortable you know,” Deana has the kind of smile that seems to suggest she knows more than the person she’s talking to. It’s not unkind, just irritating, only increases the scuff of her boots along the hardwood floor as she paces.

Morgan says too many things irritate her. He suggests she learns to let some of them go, she reminds him she’s let enough go she wishes she could have back. He’s always trying to teach her about meditation, frowns when she insists on hunting while he does whatever it is he does with that stick and his inner peace.

“Where’d you learn that?” he asks every time she makes quick work of skinning the squirrels and rabbits. Every time she shrugs, reminds him that she couldn’t recall exactly when she learned to play piano either, but she knows she can.

Except she does remember strong hands, a hard jaw and impossibly soft eyes; fire and freedom and fingers between hers and dancing at the small of her back.

Flutters in an empty belly and goose bumped flesh and his gruff voice came after the dead stopped being dead but still, it’s this little sliver that feels most like home when it comes to her.

Safe like church pews.

“I’d be comfortable if you didn’t take my gun and knife.”

That smile again, this time with a little chuckle.

“You know you remind me of someone….actually of a few someone’s.”

That’s all she is, reminders of someone else. Skin and bones left after too many hits and unwelcome hands and one bullet that only skimmed but still took enough.

“Morgan tells me you have some memory loss.”

Beth trails her fingertips over the spines of books pressed into the shelves lining the walls. She can’t remember a single book she’s ever read but once a time she knows she dreamt of writing one.

_“I got shot in the head at the last place they told me I was safe.”_

She doesn’t say that part out loud, there’s no need to be brash. She’s a southern girl, she knows that, and manners still count for something.

Besides, the half dollar of mutilated skin along her hairline where blonde locks never sprouted again probably speaks volumes for her. Just like the raised slashes along each cheek; too symmetrical to be accidental, lashes for non-compliance long before she fell off the wall and couldn’t put all the pieces back together again.

“I know enough,” she shrugs and moves to the window behind Deana’s chair, reaches out to brush aside the curtain, “I know who I am, I know how to take care of myself. It’s just some of the details got lost along the way.”

“I’m not doubting your capabilities Beth, it’s quite clear you know more about surviving than I could ever begin to fathom. I think you’ll be a valuable addition to our community.”

She’s turning away from the window to set the woman straight for the third time since helped Morgan through the gates that morning, she isn’t staying. She was just doing Morgan a service by helping him follow the damn map he couldn’t ever seem to stop folding and unfolding.

And then she hears it.

Somewhere, close enough to drift through the glass, a baby cries.

Her back must stiffen, knuckles tighten around the red fabric of the curtain. Her senses are sharp enough to know other woman is standing now, eyes baring into Beth’s back as she listens again.

“We have quite a few babies here, since the war. I liken them to the baby boomers. I guess you could say people celebrated, after the last of the battles.”

She never had a baby, Dr. Edwards told her so. The man had sewn her back together enough times to know her body well enough to know she’d never been a mother.

Well, she’d never given birth to a baby at least.

_“She’s beautiful.”_

_“Oh she ain’t mine.”_

Concrete and steel under her boots, pacing and rocking and little fists in her hair. Beth knows that the scar on her wrist came from before the downy baby peach fuzz she can still feel brush her chin if she closes her eyes because that love feels so full she never would have left it, not by choice.

“Didn’t think I’d ever see a baby again.”

Almost a few times but there were plenty of little pills to fix that, no repercussions for what happened behind closed doors and locked handcuffs and battery powered stereos turned up loud enough to muffle screams.

Deana works the curtain from her grip with some gentle prodding and opens it all the way, letting sunlight bathe them both as they look out into the street. The little colony was quiet when she arrived bathed by darkness but now it is bustling, and it takes her a second to follow the trail of the finger Deana points towards a home across the street. The railing of the front porch had once been white, but someone had taken extra time to paint the rungs in assorted colors of the rainbow and spell out of the word ‘nursey’ on a hand-crafted sign.

“Would you like to hold a baby Beth?”

She isn’t staying, she can’t. What’s left of her isn’t made for this world with framed photos and porch swings and walls. She’s been stuck on rooftops and at the last stop of broken elevators too long to ache for walls.

It can’t hurt though, just to look. It can’t hurt to have a memory to take back with her into the quiet that is sweet and so fresh she doesn’t have to work it like a puzzle. So, she nods, shrugs, follows Deana through doorways until they’re breathing fresh air and more voices than she’s heard in months blend into a pleasant background lull.

Except they’re half way across the street and someone at the top of the gate shouts something. Tension builds in every joint and her hand goes to hip, finds her holster empty she almost fumes, almost turns on the woman beside her with a closed fist. The voices though, are happy. People on the ground move towards the gate and crank wheels and lift boards until the long doors begin to open.

“Oh,” Deana breathes in a pleased little huff, “our main run team is back. They’ve been off doing trade for two weeks.”

She watches with mild curiosity as vans pull into through the gates and a small crowd gathers around, exchanging relieved back pats and handshakes.

Beth’s never been here but the entire process is tinged with familiarity. These people are family, loving one another and providing for one another and knowing each other.

And she is just a skeleton held up by ghosts. Too strong to die, too weak not to. Not like these people, not like the risen either.

She’s stuck somewhere in between.

“I know you aren’t staying,” Deana precedes her statement, “but there are some people I’d like you to meet later, before you leave.”

They’ve slowed to an awkward lull in the middle of the street.

“Maybe I shouldn’t go in there,” she hears herself huff suddenly, rolling a shoulder towards the nursery. “I’m not…”

Clean. Whole. Right. Sane. Stable. Safe.

She’s not sure if she said any of it out loud.

_“You’re not strong Beth. Whoever your people were, they’re better off without you.”_

“Oh sweetie,” Deana’s hand finds her wrist and the contact makes her twitch and her scars itch and the durable tendons in her calves and thighs that have taken her down elevator shafts and thru creeks tell her to run.

_“Eventually it’s always the same out there, we run.”_

The roar of a motorcycle is one of the many unexplained sound bites in the juxtaposed bag of leftover memories she carries. All at once the noise soothes her nerves like a lullaby and Beth turns. The gates are being pulled closed for good behind the sleek chrome tailpipe of the bike that circles around the vans and comes to an eventual halt on the outskirt of the gathered crowd.

He’s solid, tall, lean muscle, tanned skin, torn jeans and shaggy hair; he steps off the bike and twists one arm behind his back in a stretch, rolls his neck back and forth a few times and pats absent mindedly at his pocket until he produces a pack of cigarettes.

All the empty spaces in the glued together ceramic that is her brain seem slighter somehow. Just as he brings his lighter up to the menthol between his lips he freezes. She thinks his ears and the tip of his nose would twitch if they could as he scans his surroundings, a blood hound who just picked back up on a cold trail.

His hands go slack at his sides, the smoke hanging lazily under his lip as their eyes meet.

The world tilts.

“Beth?” Deana reaches out to her but she’s moving, can’t even feel the asphalt under her feet but he’s closer now and she knows exactly how he’ll smell before she reaches him.

“How?” is all he manages when their boot toes knock.

“I don’t know,” she almost laughs a little, “I don’t know a lot actually.”

Two hardened hands come down on her shoulders, checking to see if she’s solid. When they graze her skin they both sigh in relief.

“You died Beth,” this time his words come out in a croak, tears slipping from the corners of blue eyes. One hand trails up the side of her face, callused fingertips brushing scar tissue.

“Some of me,” she confirms but her words are crushed as she’s pulled in against his chest, into leather and nicotine and home and Amen.

She could burrow inside him and never leave; live whatever life is left in this exact spot with her ear pressed to the heart that she knows can fill all the gaps for her.

The question comes through a sob and into his shirt and he pulls away just in the slightest to hear her better.

“Wha’?”

She traces the planes of his face with one finger.

“Do you know what my mamma’s name was?”

He cocks his head, raises an eyebrow but nods.

“Annette,” he reminds, “your daddy never stopped talkin’ bout her.”

“Annette,” she repeats, feels so much weight released from her shoulders as her tongue frees the syllables that his grasp is the only thing keeping her from floating away.

Maybe she could stay.


End file.
